US Court Directs Donald Trump To Pay $5 Million In Sexual Assault Case

A US judge has directed Donald Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexual assault and defamation.

On Wednesday, federal judge Lewis Kaplan ordered that the $5 million that Trump had been asked to deposit with the court be paid.

In a separate defamation case in New York, Trump was ordered to pay $83.3 million to Carroll. That judgment was upheld on appeal, but its enforcement remains suspended.

President Trump had already deposited the money in an account. The U.S. Supreme Court recently dismissed his appeal against the 2023 civil verdict, clearing the way for Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to release the money.

Trump's lawyers have accused his political opponents of using the legal system against him and will now approach 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to stop the payment.

Last week, the US Supreme Court refused to hear Trump's appeal against the original May 2023 judgment ordering him to pay $2 million in damages for sexual assault and $3 million for defamatory statements.

The case stems from allegations made by Carroll, a former journalist and columnist who is now 82, who accused the president of assaulting her in a dressing room of a New York department store in 1996.

The allegations came to be published in a 2019 book, after which Trump called the journalist a "nut job" and claimed she had fabricated the case.

A jury found Trump attacked Carroll and defamed her after she described it publicly in a 2019 memoir, during his first term as president. Trump called her allegations false and said “she’s not my type” in an interview.

In her testimony before the jury, Carroll had stated that their flirtatious and friendly chance encounter at the department store had turned violent. Trump said he never knew Carroll and accused her of trying to sell books at his expense and of having political motives.

Trump had also countersued Carroll for using the term “rape” in reference to the incident, but Judge Lewis Kaplan threw out the claim as he found the distinction between forcing one’s hand inside a person’s vagina without their consent and one’s penis was insignificant to the average person, writing, “Both are felonious sex crimes.”

Carroll told the court that she was never intimate with a man again after the assault, and that she had feared for her life in constant paranoia when Trump derided her to his fanbase as president.